Tuesday, 18 August 2009

How did we get here?

One of the difficulties of getting out from under the obesity thing, is that it is like an estuary with many streams of thought flowing into it.
We are trapped within that; directed there more by momentum as reason.

Opportunism- the desire to take advantage of circumstance to gain the greatest opportunity for personal or group advancement, will always exist. What makes the crisis tricky to get a grasp of is that it depends on so much we've all have come to accept as 'fact'. We have come to believe in certain ideas of ourselves and are trapped until we can begin to examine these in a new light.

The ways we have come to see eating, activity and even the ways we make things happen for instance.

Fat acceptance is fascinating in that it is at times said to be radical. To me that means to take an idea at its root following through with it, logically. Taking in information and testing that logic with facts along the way. To then come to understand and conclude from that.

A theme from the sixties has led that word to refer to anything which challenges the status quo - or appears to.
I'm not sure fat acceptance can do this yet. We are all too formed in the image of mainstream tenets of how fatness is defined, along with food and eating to be able to offer an alternative that could be deemed radical. I'm not even sure it if is necessary in the case of eating, it has a distinct unalterable biological purpose.

We got here by changing these things to fit the model that says eating is an act of self creation and food the building block. We are what we eat.

Seeing eating purely as an act of self willed creation, is more extreme or radical than not. (Though the latter would be in a tortuous sense of not seeing eating as intrinsic to being human). A radical notion that attacks the root of what it is to be human at least.